Chronicles Magazine
May 2018

Some of the greatest events in human history simply fail to register in popular consciousness. Last year, we rightly heard a terrific amount about the Reformation, or at least, about its early Lutheran phase.

How do you make sense of New York? There’s lots of intelligence, talent, and ambition here. There’s also a lot of insanity. When Barack Obama won his first presidential election people in my neighborhood partied in the streets all night.

Facts ruin bad arguments. So let these facts sink in for a minute. According to the FBI, in 2016 murderers using handguns killed 7, 105 Americans. That same year, murderers using any kind of rifle killed only 374 Americans.

It’s likely that psephologists will discover from their postmortems on the recent primary election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District that the barely victorious candidate, Conor Lamb, won by appealing to the “nice” Republican portion...

Did Pope Francis deny the existence of Hell? If previous episodes in this pontificate are any guide, those who earnestly seek a definitive answer will likely discover that, much like the natural fate of the Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

The idea of a nation (natio) that is rootless—not tied to a particular land (patria)—is an absurdity. It is the flip side of the idea of a “nation of immigrants,” which arose in the late 19th century and took hold on the American imagination...

“Liberalism has failed,” writes University of Notre Dame political-science professor Patrick Deneen in his new book with a related title. “Nearly every one of the promises . . . made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been...

When the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s preliminary injunction against President Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from certain countries, it cited Trump’s statements about Islam as its rationale.

Rémi Brague, the French Catholic historian and political philosopher, made his wider reputation in the early 1990’s with his book Europe, la voie romaine, in which he attempted a sketch of what Europe should be following its reunification after...

I have been reading through, here and there at odd moments as I find the time, the Fall/Winter number of The Chesterton Review, generously sent me by Fr. Ian Boyd, C.S.B., the journal’s editor, and designated its Special Journalism Issue.

While America’s attention remains focused on the North Korea crisis, another dangerous East Asia confrontation has re-emerged. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is taking new steps to intimidate Taiwan and force the island’s leaders to move...

Until March 22, when the White House announced that John Bolton would replace H.R. McMaster as national security advisor, it was still possible to imagine that President Donald Trump’s many compromises with the globalist-hegemonist establishment...

Back in the day, was there anyone more famous than Arturo Toscanini? Everyone knew who he was, what he did, and what he looked like. He was more famous than Walt Disney and got coverage like a movie star.

Growing up in the 1950’s, I was regaled with many stories about nuns and their punishing ways. Having attended Roman Catholic grammar school through the third grade, I did some regaling myself despite knowing full well that my tales were just...

I have been a member of a private club up in the Alps since 1959. Its name is the Eagle Ski Club, and I joined it when I was 20 years of age. Sixty years later I’ve resigned as a life member because of an incident I won’t go into, as things...

Writing in this issue of Chronicles, Frank Brownlow, the scholar and literary critic, quotes W.H. Auden as having described logic as “a condition of the world,” like aesthetics and ethics. Auden was right, which makes advanced liberalism’s...

Democrats are feeling overconfident. They won a hard-fought special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District in early March, then saw over a million people take to the streets in cities across the country to march for gun control...

Paroxysms of liberal outrage gripped denizens of the Swamp when the Commerce Department announced that it plans to find out the citizenship status of U.S. residents by asking them directly via the 2020 Census and the U.S. Mail.